Before And After The Absolute End of the World
by The Mad Poet
Summary: Fifty sentences for fifty moments in time. Somewhere in all the alchemy and ancient Peruvian drug-cults and multiple apocali, Fubuki and Yusuke still manage to just be friends. Mild warning for cultist hoopla and a lighthearted reference to necro.


**DISCLAIMER:** If I owned GX, the entire 'genocide and redemption in five episodes or less' thing would have taken longer than five episodes. Also, more cults. Anyway, I'm not making any money off of this, written soley for entertainment, blah blah, legal jargon. However, all these lame little sentences and any original concepts or ideas therein are mine so if you take them I may be forced to hunt you down and beat you with a tire iron, because fanfiction after all is VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS. The following sentences were written as part of a challenge race between Batpig Sexgod and myself. Pretty much the entire set of fifty makes certain conjectures from the cannonically presented information filtered through my alchemic cultist nerd sensibilities, and may not sit entirely square with the general fandom consensus.  
Warning for cultist hijinks and a lighthearted jab at Fubuki's apparent skill at stealing the hearts of all women, living and dead alike.

**50 sentences: Themeset Gamma  
****Fandom: Yu-gi-oh GX  
****Characters: Tenjoin Fubuki and Fujiwara Yusuke**

#01 - Ring  
Every night before lights out Fubuki's phone rang, and every night he rushed to answer it, and every night he whiled away the last of his evening nattering away about nothing significant at all, ignoring everything else around him; and so every night Yusuke decided that he hated Fubuki's vaunted baby sister _just a little bit more_.

#02 - Hero  
When all was said and done, Yusuke was still angry at himself--it was not some stranger in red who had been supposed to save him or even Honest, but somehow in the middle of it all he had managed to cheat himself out of his own hero.

#03 - Memory  
Even if Fubuki could not always recall what he had eaten for breakfast five minutes after rinsing his plate, Yusuke was comforted by the knowledge that he would never forget about _him_; he liked to walk with his hands in the boy's back pocket and somehow, miraculously, Fubuki always remembered to wear the pants with the deepest and most comfortable ones.

#04 - Box  
Locking Honest away was not the most difficult thing that Yusuke had ever done or even particularly difficult at all--sinfully easy, almost, which was ironic given the spirit's whole guardian angel schtick--but somehow, bizarrely, even though it was true he could not look Fubuki in the eye when he explained that actually, there was nothing important in the box beneath the hermetic seals at all.

#05 - Run  
"I'm never speaking to you again," he hissed over his shoulder, furious and trying desperately not to laugh as they dashed madly towards the classroom, all skidding shoes on waxed floors, and slid into their seats in the last breath before the bell; but Fubuki just smiled, because there was always time in his world for a little game of 'hide the homework' and pixie sticks before first period.

#06 - Hurricane  
Being near Fubuki was like standing in the center of a technicolor hurricane, and it left Yusuke feeling tired and frazzled and flattened and dazed but at the same time he would not have traded it for anything because, after all, no matter how badly damaged it left him feeling Fubuki always helped him rebuild again after.

#07 - Wings  
When Fubuki promised that he would help the whole world see how much higher he flew than anyone else, Yusuke did not have the heart to tell him that sometimes he did not feel like he had wings of his own at all.

#08 - Cold  
_I thought you were wonderful, dazzling, transcendant, everything_ Fubuki had said, but he had said it with venomous digust and in the past tense, an absolute, and for all his years in the darkness nothing had ever left Yusuke feeling quite so cold as the sudden realization that it would never be true again.

#09 - Red  
The night Fubuki gave himself his inductive wounds Yusuke could not follow suit, and he said that it was because he didn't believe in that nonsense but the truth was that no amount of soothing incense could change how terrified he was of how very very red the blood had been on his friend's hands.

#10 - Drink  
When Fubuki asked Yusuke to drink the soupy herbal draughts made for the purpose of his rituals Yusuke dubiously asked about their contents, and when Yusuke gave Fubuki experimental concoctions of boiled metals and filtered bloods and waste Fubuki downed them all in blind faith without batting an eye; it probably said something about the two of them, but mostly that they spent a lot of pocket money on mouthwash.

#11 - Midnight  
"You have to do these things after midnight," Fubuki whispered to him as they slipped out of the building, but when Yusuke asked if it had some sort of religious significance his friend only laughed that no, of course not, but it made for a better ghost story that way.

#12 - Temptation  
Though they did not always agree on such things, Yusuke was certain that even Fubuki could not have argued this one--absolute power and transcendence over all the flaws and miseries of humanity seemed like an _awfully_ good deal for something as trifling petty as his individuality.

#13 - View  
"I can show you the deepest shadows in every heart that has ever been," Yusuke hissed to him, ecstatic except _not,_ and not Yusuke either, and his eyes were narrowed terribly with a fury that was not fury at all but the glassy emptiness of the shadow he had become (oh irony of ironies), "But somehow, for all the dark I know you cherish and harbor, I can't see _yours_."

#14 - Music  
Fubuki secretly thought that Yusuke had the world's worst taste in music, but this made sense only to him because Yusuke did not like music at all.

#15 - Silk  
They clasped hands and it it seemed strange to him that their skin should speak their secret truths so blatantly; Fubuki's coarsely rough as canvas, and Yusuke's smooth as silk save a few imperfections--negligible, really, except in the subtly troubling ways they ruined the whole--like tiny loose threads where the knife had slipped.

#16 - Cover  
When Yusuke angrily scrawled over the faces of his parents in black grease pen, Fubuki did not question him; he simply handed him another photo to tack up over the empty place they had once occupied on the wall.

#17 - Promise  
"These pictures are all promises, Yusuke--that you will never be alone, and no one will ever forget," and they had pinky sworn on it like kindergarteners, but Yusuke always had secretly liked to prove him wrong.

#18 - Dream  
At times Fubuki dreamed that he was being destroyed from the inside, not by glorious dark fire but a cold and lassitudous chill, but these did not frighten him as much as the dreams that he could not remember, which woke him not in a cold sweat but with the unsettlingly warm feeling of tears on his face.

#19 - Candle  
"They say that a single candle can brighten the deepest darkness," he joked, but he did not really smile until Yusuke somberly reached up and pinched the lonely flame out between his fingertips.

#20 - Talent  
Fubuki seemed to be able to do everything at once perfectly without even the most rudimentary of efforts, and Yusuke poured furious dedication into his few endeavors with a singleminded intensity and fanatacism which rivaled the sun, and neither one said anything but they each hated each other, just a little bit, for so naturally doing the one thing which the other could not.

#21 - Silence  
Sometimes when they stayed up after curfew doing schoolwork together--or _other things_ which should have been strictly forbidden but were not on the sole grounds that outlawing alchemy and obscure ancient religious practices was not something that most schools thought to do--Yusuke wondered what it was they had between them, but he did not ask; somewhere in the place that gods and science overlapped, where Fubuki's bounding faith locked horns with his cynical fear, little things like words and definitions had ceased to entirely matter.

#22 - Journey  
For one moment, when they stood together on the threshold of the door into absolute Darkness, Yusuke did not want to leave Fubuki behind but take his hand and go into it with him together--and he knew, most of all, that beneath the begging that he stay Fubuki wanted it too.

#23 - Fire  
The Darkness Yusuke reached out to was cold and empty; he was not at all certain where Fubuki had found one made of such all-consuming fire.

#24 - Strength  
He had not been human in a long time, but when he found that his old legs could no longer hold him up he still did not fall--Fubuki was there at his side, carrying him despite it all.

#25 - Mask  
When Yusuke smiled at him in the Dark for the last time and offered him the mask it was not "I don't need this any more" which he first heard; for just one moment the words seemed to be I don't need _you_ and that, maybe most of all, was why he took it in the end.

#26 - Ice  
No matter what else happened, Yusuke never entirely forgave Fubuki for putting ice down the back of his shirt the first day of speech class.

#27 - Fall  
"Just close your eyes and let yourself fall," Fubuki said from somewhere behind him, unseen, too distant to be felt, "it's a trust game, and I promise I'll catch you."

#28 - Forgotten  
"The deepest irony and idiocy of it all," Fubuki remarked acidly, "is that in all this drama about making a world that cannot forget you, I'm the only one who hasn't--you've forced the world you came from to do just exactly that."

#29 - Dance  
The night he apologized for very nearly ending the world via sabbatic intervention in a fit of postpubescent teenaged angst, Yusuke had expected some sort of violent reaction or rejection; he had not expected that Fubuki, dressed up like some sort of gaudily sugar-coated fairytale prince, would sweep him out into the middle of the graduation party to waltz crazily down the dorm's entryhall, laughing all the way.

#30 - Body  
Yusuke did not ask any questions the night he found Fubuki gleefully cuddling some poor girl's slightly wearworn corpse, but the next morning he _did _ask him to please, for the love of God, remember to put a sock on the door next time.

#31 - Sacred  
Once he had written obscene things in white paint all across Fubuki's prayer circles just to see what would happen, but Fubuki had only silently and solitarily spent the night up scrubbing the chamber clean; when he finished he had only said one sentence, cryptically, and gently touched his hand; "Some things are more sacred."

#32 - Farewells  
Fubuki was never satisfied to simply say goodnight when they retired to their seperate rooms; he always hugged Yusuke and kissed him soundly on the cheek as if they would be apart for some unspeakable length of time, and greeted him again in the morning with an enthusiasm so ravening it seemed that they must have been after all: Yusuke did not complain only because he knew the reason why.

#33 - World  
"This is a world without lonliness or pain," Yusuke screamed across the blasted sands at him in frustration, voice echoing glassily, "This is what we've bought and paid for, everything we wanted; so why doesn't it make you happy?!"

#34 - Formal  
Formally and technically, Yusuke's upright bearing and academic dedication had always made him a better student than anyone else in the entirety of any school; he was not entirely sure then why it was that on his first day at Duel Academy he found himself second in the rank roster to some joker in a gag shirt who could not stop talking about musicals during the teacher's lecture.

#35 - Fever  
The one time Yusuke had become sick he had been terrified that he would die before making a memorable name for himself; Fubuki had been terrified only that they would run out of chicken soup and comedy movies to while the fever away before he recovered.

#36 - Laugh  
Fubuki laughed at everything; Yusuke laughed only at Fubuki.

#37 - Lies  
Fubuki told everyone that the only reason Yusuke ranked in second was that he was holding himself back to give the rest of them a chance at the curve, Yusuke told Fubuki that he was not jealous of him at all, and everyone involved told themselves that this was the truth, and sometimes they joked that the only one at Duel Academy who was honest that year at all was the angel.

#38 - Forever  
"I'm so sorry, Yusuke," he said into the screaming wind, the blasting oily light, the sand a flurry of knives all around them and yet somehow everyone knew that was not at all why Fubuki was crying when the fire swept them both up and shredded them into so much nothing; he was smiling, after all, smiling too widely at all for it to have anything to do with anything except that horrifyingly lovestruck joy, "But at least now, we can be together."

#39 - Overwhelmed  
The moment Yusuke realized that the treasured darkness he could not see in Fubuki's heart had been him all along he was torn between feeling nothing at all, and that there were some things even he was happier not knowing.

#40 - Whisper  
"Don't go," Fubuki whispered desperately one more time, their fingers touching where they overlapped on the cold metal of the mask, and now it was Yusuke who was the only one who could smile when he replied "I win," and let go.

#41 - Wait  
The thing that Yusuke both hated and loved most about fishing was how much time you spent just sitting there, waiting, with nothing better to do but drink soda and pick animal shapes and the occaisonal hula-dancing ninja (if Fubuki was at all to be believed) out of the clouds.

#42 - Talk  
Fubuki had always talked altogether too much and he knew it, but up until the point he realized that his great new friend Yusuke was completely ignoring everything he said he had sort of hoped that someone out there thought he was wrong.

#43 - Search  
Sometimes late at night Fubuki would take the mask out and put it on not for any religious purpose, but simply to move through the darkness in search of something imperative, something he had lost, which he knew deep down inside did not truly exist any more at all.

#44 - Hope  
There was something surreal and obscurely frightening about Fubuki to him, even now; the way he could talk about living in pure hope and pure agony with the same dreamy smile.

#45 - Eclipse  
The onlookers could not have known or understood the frantically hurried quality to their confrontation but _they _did, certainly and absolutely, because the sun was being swallowed ever faster and with the halo would come the angel but they were not ready for him, not yet; there was still so much to say before they ceased to be each other entirely.

#46 - Gravity  
When Fubuki told him that he was wrong Yusuke already knew, deep down in the part of him that was in fact still Yusuke, but by that point he could not admit it--he had done too much, given too much, promised too much, and the weight of his actions promised right back to crush him if his resolve faltered in the slightest.

#47 - Highway  
"I think that someday it would be fun to buy a motorcycle, or maybe just one of those preposterously expensive little American sportscars with the terrible mileage, and drive until you just forget about the rest of the world," Fubuki said one day, for no appreciable reason, and Yusuke smiled instead of telling him how cold the idea of forgetfulness made him feel--later he would laugh about it, because forgetting the whole rotten world was exactly what he meant them to do after all, and they wouldn't even need to worry about gas stations along the way when they did.

#48 - Unknown  
That Fubuki was in love with his best friend was not at all unusual and wholly to be expected because Fubuki after all was in love with everyone and everything and love itself most of all, but there was something special and wholly unique about loving Yusuke, something not at all romantic but still _different_, somehow, so that even someone so intimately accquainted with the concept as Fubuki did not know if it was entirely right to call it anything so worn and used as 'love' at all.

#49 - Lock  
The day that Fubuki lost the key to his secret cupboard he had not hesitated but gone immediately to the school's metal shop instead for the most absolutely vicious-looking and heavy tool he could possibly find; no silly little lock was going to get between him and the one thing his friend had left behind for him.

#50 - Breathe  
There are some truths which cannot change from the beginning of the world to its end, which no one can protect you from; after so long drowning in darkness, it was not the light that hurt him so much as trying to breathe again.


End file.
